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Friday, December 30, 2011

New Year’s Cookies and Cakes.

There are just a couple of days left to do some New Year
baking. You could go the nutritious, historically intriguing, but rather stolid
route and make some Ankerstock, but you probably wont.

You could instead make New Year Cakes from the recipe below,
provided of course that you have ‘man,
or a very strong woman’ to do the kneading for you. I wont make these, I assure
you. The dough sounds like a rich, sweet scone dough, and as every good baker
knows, the rule for scones is mix as lightly and quickly as possible. Even if
it is intended to be like a rich, sweet bread dough, I don’t understand the
insistence on such serious kneading. Perhaps one of the serious bread-bakers
amongst you could make comment?

The New Year Cookies
given below also seem like a cheat - they sound more like sweet crackers than
sweet biscuits (cookies, if you insist.) Is there no Christmas fruit cake left?

New-Year's Cake.

Three pounds of flour, sifted.

A pound and a half of powdered white sugar.

A pound of fresh butter.

A pint of milk with a small teaspoonful of
pearl-ash melted in it.

Having sifted the flour, spread the sugar on
the paste-board, a little at a time, and crush it to powder by rolling it with
the rolling-pin. Then mix it with the flour. Cut up in the flour the butter and
mix it well by rubbing it in with your bands. Add by degrees the milk. Then
knead the dough very hard, till it no longer sticks to your hands. Cover it,
set it away for an hour or two, and then knead it again in the same manner. You
may repeat the kneading several times. Then cut it into pieces, roll out each
piece into a sheet half an inch thick. Cut it into large flat cakes with a tin
cutter. You may stamp each cake with a wooden print, by way of ornamenting the
surface.

Sprinkle with flour some large flat tin or
iron pans, lay the cakes in them and bake them of a pale brown, in an oven of
equal heat throughout.

These cakes require more and harder kneading
than any others, therefore it is best to have them kneaded by a man, or a very
strong woman.

They are greatly improved by the addition of
some carraway seeds worked into the dough.

Rub three
fourths of a cup of butter into six cups of flour. Pour half a cup of boiling
water over one cup and a half of sugar, add a scant half teaspoonful of soda,
and when the sugar is melted, stir all into the flour. Roll out thin.

Mrs. Lincoln's Boston Cook
Book: What to Do and what Not to Do in Cooking (1883)

Quotation for the Day.

Every country possesses, it seems, the sort of cuisine it
deserves, which is to say the sort of cuisine it is appreciative enough to
want. Waverley Lewis Root